From: Sandro Hawke (sandro@w3.org)
Date: 03/16/04
> Multiple Semantic Web Languages [3] (if Sandro is available) (all - 20 min) [ I expect to attend. The fetus is still awaiting a Director's Decision or something, I don't know. I'll have to switch to my mobile phone around 5pm, though, if we run late as usual. ] There was a related thread in WebOnt last week. The archives are publically accessible: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webont-wg/2004Mar/0003 I observed that aside from the politics and perception, there are some decent reasons to carrying other language expressions in RDF: - You'll have an RDF/XML parser and triplestore anyway - RDF/XML users should have a smooth migration path - When ontologies are just more RDF data, RDF systems for handling provenance, pub/sub, trust, etc can be directly applied But these might be served by putting SWRL expressions inside RDF literals, too. The syntactic similarity between terms and clauses in eg Prolog can be rather useful, while the semantic differences can be quite confusing. Compare/contrast Java with Scheme. Which is more elegant? Which is more successful? Which boat do you want to be in? This may be a hard point around which to find consensus. My sense is still: - SWRL should have a presentation syntax (something like Prolog or InfixKIF, as Harold was working on, or N3); I believe we agreed on this in principle last time. That syntax should be seen as a first-class exchange protocol, (unlike n-triples and InfixKIF, which were disclaimed as second-class special purpose languages by their creators.) Since SWRL is an extension of (at least a subset of) RDF, this serves also as an alternative serialization for (at least some) RDF graphs. - SWRL should not have an "RDF-Like" syntax, since that would cause RDF systems to do odd and problematic things with SWRL axioms. SWRL should either have an RDF syntax or nothing like an RDF syntax. -- sandro
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